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Name: Rich
Country: United States
State: Iowa
Gender: Male
Interests: Scientific anomalies, alternative history, cutting edge sci/tech, watching basketball, surfing the web.
Expertise: Statistics, Predictive Modeling
Occupation: Marketing
Industry: Media
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
3/2/2002
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| Wow, the last two weeks have been a time of great highs and tremendous lows, although the lows are just temporary. First, I went on vacation to the Virgin Islands with my girlfriend. I enjoyed daily snorkeling journeys, the sea was my fish tank all week. Had two day-long boat trips, one on a sail boat trip to St. John, where the captain served perhaps the best lunch I've ever had at beautiful Honeymoon beach. And a power boat party trip to the BVI, walking through the rocks thrown up out of the earth at the Bathes, a nice lunch at the island Marina Cay, snorkeling Diamond reef, and then an afternoon at the beautiful white sand beach of Jost Van Dyke, where one of the guys on the boat saw Joe Montana come out of the bathroom behind the Soggy Dollar Bar. Unfortunately, my girlfriend got sick on the BVI trip, but I still had fun. Fortunately she didn't have that issue on the sail boat. Also, on vacation, I read a good book about pyramids writte by Philip Coppens. While it has some issues, I like it as it transforms the traditional argument of alternative thinkers on the pyramid debate. He's not trying to argue that they are older than they really are, which is refreshing, but moreso focuses on why multiple civilizations around the world built them. This is a more interesting topic for me, although I'm not sure if I agree with some of his conclusions. Then, after arriving back to Iowa, I managed to get a sore throat and missed a day of work. The next day, I felt a bit better, so I worked and went to flag football practice. I had been playing volleyball for many years, but we struggled to get a team put together for this year, and one of my regular players had a boyfriend with a flag football team, so I figured, why not. Anyway, at my 2nd football practice this past week, I sustained a painful injury. I was playing safety, and a receiver caught a pass behind the corner in our zone defense. I had been shadowing another guy in my zone, so I hustled over there when I saw the pass heading that way. I positioned myself slightly upfield from the receiver, not wanting to give up a touchdown by taking too agressive of an angle. Well, as I was stopping myself in front of the receiver, he was catching the pass near the sideline, still with his head turned back looking at the ball. He immediately ran straight up field, without turning his head. I was expecting him to juke or something, as I was stopping in front of him. As it turns out, he ended up making contact with me at full force as I was stopping, with his ear making contact with my lips. This caused two top front teeth to cut through my lip and then cut his ear. I had skin hanging from the inside of my mouth, about a 3/4 inch by 1/2 inch area up top had been made a bit thinner. It was still connected on the left side. It bled for a little bit, but that stoped within maybe 2 minutes. This happened at nearly 9pm, so I went home, took two ibuprofin and then went to the doctor the next morning. Eating was proving especially difficult and it was very gross to have the skin hanging off the lip. At least it's on the inside of the mouth, I may be scared for life, but at least it's not really visible My doctor informed me the skin was dead and cut it off. I then got a tetnis shot and was told to take antibiotics, tylenol and ibuprofen. Ever since I've been miserable, running a fever last night, upset stomach from the ibuprofen, lip and tooth pain, pain from the tetnis shot. Anyway, the lip is healing. Hopefully the tooth is ok, I have some root pain in one my front teeth, but it looks fine. Hopefully, life will get back to normal soon. Not sure if I'll continue with flag football. Stinks that this trauma is spoiling the good vibe I had from vacation. Hopefully, I can bring those memories back into my conciousness and move forward with a more enjoyable existance in the near future. | | |
| Wow, it's been over a year since my last post. Hopefully, I'll get back into this to a greater extent moving forward. Let's see, what's the major happenings to talk about... Great to see that all of the presidential candidates are more serious about the environment than the current president. I'm especially rooting for Obama, but anyone will be an improvement over the current administration. Not sure about McCain though, with his 100 years of war in Iraq comment, not being very knowledgable about the economy and approaching the age of dirty (well, at least it seems that way to me at barely less than half his age). It's about time we had a president to represent our generation and make decisions with the long-term in mind. Given the energy and atmospheric CO2 issues we have in the world, I've been taking steps to reduce my energy use and make life easier. I've done some simple things, like doing a better job recycling, about once a week biking the 30 mile round trip to work & back last summer, adjusting the programmable thermastat in the house to conserve energy both while we're home (we dress for the season within the house) and when we're away and turning off the pilot light to the gas log fireplace. I've also splurged for the following items over the past year towards these ends: - Laundry Pure: Plug it into your washing machine for detergent-free, fabric softener-free, cold water laundry washing via silver ion nanotechnology and radiant catalytic ionization oxidizers. Eliminates the need to presort laundry (once the dyes settle after the first few washes after newly purchased), helps the environment (no detergents, no hot water), avoid allergies to detergents, makes clothes softer and eliminates wear & tear on clothes due to detergents. Can get a deal on them at e-Bay.
- Spin Dryer: If you have a top load washer, use it to get a lot of water (and soap) out of your clothes in 2-3 minutes for a half-load before possibly moving your clothes on to the dryer. It spins at ~3000 rpms where most top load washers spin at 500-600 rpms. Reduces drying times & energy use, reduces wear and tear on clothes due to baking them in the dryer. Great for items that can't go in the dryer. Not as helpful if you already have a front-load washer, as they tend to spin 1000-1200 rpms, and clothes don't get as wet in those washers as the clothes move in & out of the water.
- Floor Washing Robot: My girlfriend greatly appreciates not having to scrub the floors by hand now. And I appreciate her not complaining about scrubing the floor, while I'm not helping her do it. :) Actually got mine in a good deal off Home Shopping Network's web site.
- And of course lots of CFL light bulbs, and even some LED accent lighting for the stair-wells and some motion activated LED night lights with photocells for the bathrooms. LEDs aren't too powerful, so you can avoid blinding yourself late at night and save energy at the same time. :) I highly recommend this LED night light for the bathroom.
Looking at my last post, I did end up changing jobs 6 months after that. My new job is 3 miles away, so that helps with my personal energy saving intiative. Finally got to a point where many factors convinced me to switch. Not sure if it was the best move, but I was definitely ready for a change. I'm now working in credit card finance helping my employer instead of in publishing marketing helping other companies. It seems that my SAS and advanced math skills are definitely my biggest selling points to employers--seems to be a big need for technical people with these skills. Still doing well in CAPS with my investing hobby. Changing jobs was nice simply to allow me to roll my 401k into a self-managed rollover IRA instead of being forced to chose from the limited number of mutual funds. There are some great low cost trading options out there for savvy individual investors. Also, have been physically active with biking, running, volleyball, kickboxing and now even flag football activities. We're on our way to St Thomas, USVI, soon for vacation at the timeshare, which should be a blast once again despite being a very wasteful luxury. | | |
| Thought I'd make an entry after some time away. I've started a Motley Fool CAPS investment page, see my portfolio here. I have a fair number of clean energy, oil drilling, biotech, tech, and nanotech stocks in the portfolio--even have a robot stock in there. At one point (while the market was down in Feb) I was about the worst player in CAPS, but things have improved a lot lately. Right now I'm ranked 178th out of about 25,000 investors, largely because Dendreon got a favorable FDA panel decision on a cancer drug about a week ago (final FDA approval is still pending). Have also been reading a very interesting book by AI expert Ray Kurzweil that has a very positive spin on the future given the ongoing amd accelerating change that is occuring in tech fields such as biotech, nanotech, robotics and computers. Very refreshing take compared to the sci-fi of the Matrix & Terminator series', etc. Basically forsees us merging our bodies w/ our technology as computers gradually superceed human intelligence over the next 40 years or so. Technology will largely allow us to pick our own age and stay there, becoming practically immortal barring a serious accident. We'll eventually be able to materialize about any material object we want via nanotechnology. Biotech is already extending lifespans, computer power per thousand dollars doubles every year and should exceed human intelligence in the 2020s, we're learning how to develop software to mimic the brain and should have that largely completed in the 2030s, robots are used regularly for military purposes already and are starting to get used in the home, nanotechnology allows mini-machines to manipulate things at the levels of molecules or atoms already, and eventually small intelligently directed nanotech 'armies' will be able to build about anything from scratch. Along these lines, I've bought a vacuuming robot to help me out around the house, great for those who dislike repetitive chores like me. Highly recommended based upon the first 2 weeks of use. The company, iRobot, is one of the stocks I added to my CAPS page. They are working on both cleaning robots for the home, as well as, military robots for, well, the military. Took time in January/February to finally finish Wizardry 8, a highly recommended CRPG from a ways back. Combines humor, history, futurism, interesting NPCs, and tons of flexibility in terms of party & character make up. The company could not find a publisher, so they self published it and went bankrupt. They spent too much time/money in developing the game as it was their first 3D movement type game and they built it off the wrong backbone, etc. along the way. Quite a shame, would have loved to see a Wizardry 9. Am at a stressful point in my career right now. Have been with the same company for ~12 years since college. Just started looking for a new job for a variety of reasons. Applied for a slightly lower level position with a strong comapny in a different industry and told my boss that I'm starting to look for a job outside the company. Have already had two interviews in two weeks for the other position. My boss told me that he is interested in promoting me and doesn't want me to leave. Says that he's been thinking about promoting me for a few months, but hadn't talked to me about it and isn't yet sure if he can convince his bosses. The VP two levels of command up from my boss has told me that he doesn't want me to leave. Not sure how all of this will ultimately work out. | | |
| Happy New Year! Apologies of rmy extended Xanga absence. Basically, I didn't have a desire to write a blog or read other blogs for a few months, so I've been living in other worlds. One such world is the movie watching world now that I have my projector set up, bought a HD-DVD player & a PS3 (for Blu-Ray movie watching along w/ gaming) and got a NetFlix membership. I've decided to step away from doing ad sales for TDG and Sub Rosa as a hobby effective at the end of 2006, so that should allow more time to relax, have fun and pursue varied interests. Hopefully I'll continue to feel the urge I feel right now in the future--if so, hopefully my posting volume will increase. My Net Flix membership has lead me to watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, which turned out to be a much better documentary than what I expected. Since I began following the science news closely prior to my 2 year stint as a Daily Grail news gather, I've taken great interest in the science of climate change and the resultant political melee. In the film, Al does a very good job of explaining the real climate science, and seemed far less boring than he did back in his 2000 campaign effort. Al's movie along with the swing in power to the Democrats in the Congress (removing Inhofe as head of the Senate's environmental committee) gives me hope that we may ultimately wake up to our responsibility to regulate & innovate to control our CO2 emmissions. Given our dependence on a finite supply of foreign oil as another reason for action besides global warming, it shouldn't be hard for us to agree that wind power, solar power, and other clean energy domestic alternatives (ethanol? hydrogen?) should be pursued with some aggressiveness, as should efforts to improve fuel efficiency. | | |
| An interesting new online Chirstian paranormal PDF magazine named Anomalos by author Tom Horn can be found here. And, of course, I'd encourage anyone who hasn't yet seen the June and earilier editions of Sub Rosa (where I sell ad space) to head over this direction. I've recently started selling the banner space at the upper left corner of The Daily Grail news site to replace Greg Taylor's Guide to Dan Brown's The Solomon Key banner.
Not a lot else going on since RAGBRAI, other than the alleged Bosnian pyramids are probably nothing more than mountains...
http://www.dailygrail.com/node/3434
http://www.dailygrail.com/node/3472#comment-17443
And Mars has roaring jets of CO2 exploding out of the ground...
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060816_mars_icecaps.html | | |
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